Rise of the New West, 1819-1829

by Frederick Jackson Turner

Although the victory was without immediate effect on the administration, which refused to act while the Florida treaty was still unratified, Adams perceived that the popular current was growing too strong to be much longer stemmed; the charge of dependence upon England was one not easy to be borne, and Clay's vision of an independent American system guided by the United States had its influence on his mind. Five months after Clay's speech, in 1820, extolling such a system, Adams set forth similar general ideas in a discussion between himself and the British minister over the regulation, of the slave-trade. [Footnote: Adams, Memoirs, V., 182] By 1822, Florida was in our possession. The success of the arms of the revolutionists was unmistakable; several governments, of sufficient stability to warrant recognition had been erected; and it was patent to the world that Spain had lost her colonies. Acting on these considerations, Monroe sent a message to Congress, March 8, 1822, announcing that the time for recognition had come, and asking for appropriations for ministers to South America. [Footnote: Richardson, Messages and Papers, II., 116]

In the mean time, the secretary of state was confronted with important diplomatic questions which, complicated the South American problem. As Spanish America broke away from the mother-country, its possessions in North America on the Pacific were exposed to seizure by the rival powers. In 1821, when Stratford Canning, the British minister to the United States, protested against a motion, in the House of Representatives, that the United States should form an establishment on the Columbia, Adams challenged any claim of England to the shores of the Pacific. "I do not know," said he, "what you claim nor what you do not claim. You claim India; you claim Africa; you claim—" "Perhaps," said Canning, "a piece of the moon." "No," said Adams, "I have not heard that you claim exclusively any part of the moon; but there is not a spot on THIS habitable globe that I could affirm you do not claim; and there is none which you may not claim with as much color of right as you can have to Columbia River or its mouth." [Footnote: Adams, Memoirs, V., 252.]

The time had arrived when Adams's familiarity with foreign diplomacy, his belief that a new nation must assert its rights with vigor if it expected to maintain them, his very testiness and irascibility, his "bull-dog fighting qualities"—in short, the characteristics that were sources of weakness to him in domestic politics—proved to be elements of strength in his conduct of foreign relations. The individualism, the uncompromising nature, the aggressiveness, and the natural love of expansion, which were traits of John Quincy Adams, became of highest service to his country in the diplomatic relations of the next few years.

Hardly a year elapsed after this defiance to England when Adams met the claims of Russia likewise with a similar challenge. On September 4, 1821, the Russian czar issued a ukase announcing the claim of Russia on the Pacific coast north of the fifty-first degree, and interdicting to the commercial vessels of other powers the approach on the high seas within one hundred Italian miles of this claim. [Footnote: U. S. Foreign Relations (1890), 439.] This assertion of Russian monopoly, which would, in effect, have closed Bering Sea, met with peremptory refusal by Adams, and on July 17, 1823, having in mind Russia's posts in California, he informed the minister, Baron Tuyl, "that we should contest the right of Russia to any territorial establishment on this continent, and that we should assume distinctly the principle that the American continents are no longer subjects for any new European colonial establishments." [Footnote: Adams, Memoirs, VI., 163.] After negotiations, Russia concluded the treaty of April 17, 1824, by which she agreed to form no establishments on the northwest coast south of latitude 54 degrees 40', and the United States reciprocally agreed to make no establishments north of that line. At the same time Russia abandoned her extreme claim of maritime jurisdiction.

While the Russian claims were under consideration, the question of the future of Cuba was also giving great concern. The Pearl of the Antilles remained in the possession of Spain when she lost her main- land colonies. By its position, commanding both the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea, it was of the highest importance to the United States as well as to the West Indian powers, England and France. From a party in Cuba itself, in September, 1822, advances were made to the United States for annexation, and Monroe sent an agent to investigate, meanwhile refraining from encouraging the movement. [Footnote: Adams, Memoirs, VI., 69, 72.]

George Canning, who became premier of England in September, 1822, was convinced that no questions relating to continental Europe could be more immediately and vitally important to Great Britain than those which related to America. [Footnote: Stapleton, Official Corresp. of George Canning, I., 48.] Alarmed lest the United States should occupy Cuba, Canning, in a memorandum to the cabinet in November, questioned whether any blow that could be struck by any foreign power in any part of the world would more affect the interests of England. [Footnote: Ibid., 52; Royal Hist. Soc., Transactions (new series), XVIII., 89] He contented himself, however, with sending a naval force to the waters of Cuba and Puerto Rico, with the double purpose of checking American aggressions and protecting English commerce. This action created suspicion on the part of the United States, and Adams issued instructions (April 28, 1823) to the American minister at Madrid, declaring that, within a half-century, the annexation of Cuba to the United States would be indispensable to the continuance and integrity of the Union itself. The laws of political gravitation would, in his opinion, ultimately bring Cuba to this country, if, in the mean time, it were not acquired by some other power. Adams's immediate policy, therefore, favored the retention of Cuba and Puerto Rico by Spain, but he refused to commit the United States to a guarantee of the independence of Cuba against all the world except that power. [Footnote: Wharton, Digest of Am. Int. Law, I., 361-366; Latane, Diplomatic Relations with Lat. Am., chap. iii.]

The mutual jealousies of the nations with respect to the destiny of Cuba became, at this time, entangled with the greater question of the intervention of the Holy Alliance in the New World. At the Congress of Verona, in November, 1822, Austria, France, Russia, and Prussia signed a revision of the treaty of the Holy Alliance, [Footnote: Snow, Treaties and Topics; Seignobos, Pol. Hist. of Europe since 1814, 762.] which had for its objects the promotion of the doctrine of legitimacy in support of the divine right of rulers, and the doctrine of intervention, for the purpose of restoring to their thrones those monarchs who had been deposed by popular uprisings, and of rehabilitating those who had been limited by written constitutions. At Verona, the allies agreed to use their efforts to put an end to the system of representative government in Europe, and to prevent its further introduction. Having already suppressed uprisings in Naples and Piedmont, the Alliance empowered France to send troops into the Spanish peninsula to restore the authority of the king of Spain and to put down the revolutionary constitution of 1820. Chateaubriand, the French representative, desired the congress to go further and intervene in Spanish America, but this question was postponed.

Alarmed by the prospect of French power in Spain and by the proposed extension of the system of the allies to the New World, Canning protested against the doctrine of intervention, and determined that, if France was to become the mistress of Spain, she should at least not control the old Spanish empire. In the spring of 1823 he made an unsuccessful effort to secure a pledge from France not to acquire any Spanish-American possessions, either by conquest or by cession from Spain. But the French government maintained its reserve, even after England disclaimed for herself the intention of acquiring Spanish-American territory. [Footnote: Stapleton, Political Life of Canning, I., 19.]

Having broken with the concert of the European powers, it was natural that England should turn to the United States, and it is very likely that the next step of Canning was influenced by the dispatches of the British minister to the United States, who reported a conversation with Adams, in June, 1823, in which the secretary strongly set forth his belief that, in view of the virtual dissolution of the European alliance, England and the United States had much in common in their policy. "With respect to the vast continent of the West," said he, "the United States must necessarily take a warm and decided interest in whatever determined the fate or affected the welfare of its component members." But he disclaimed any wish on the part of this country to obtain exclusive advantages there. He urged that England ought to recognize the independence of the revolted provinces, and he deprecated the conquest or cession of any part of them. [Footnote: Stratford Canning to George Canning, June 6, 1823, MSS. Foreign Office, America, CLXXVI; Adams, Memoirs, VI., 151; cf. Reddaway, Monroe Doctrine, 83.]

The first impression of the British minister, on hearing Adams's emphasis on the community of interests between the two nations, was that the secretary was suggesting an alliance; and it may well have been that Canning was encouraged by the American attitude to make overtures to Rush, the American minister, shortly after these dispatches must have reached him. On August 16, 1823, and three times thereafter, Canning proposed a joint declaration by England and the United States against any project by a European power of "a forcible enterprise for reducing the colonies to subjugation, on the behalf or in the name of Spain; or which meditates the acquisition of any part of them to itself, by cession or by conquest." [Footnote: Stapleton, Political Life of Canning, II., 24; W. C. Ford, in Mass. Hist. Soc. Proceedings (2d series), XV., 415.] Canning was willing to make public announcement that the recovery of the colonies by Spain was hopeless; that the matter of recognition was only a question of time; and that Great Britain did not aim at the possession of any portion of them, but that it "could not see any part of them transferred to any other power with indifference." These professions Canning desired that the United States and England should mutually confide to each other and declare "in the face of the world."